Sweet Violence by Terry Eagleton The Idea of the Tragic

Terry Eagleton's Tragedy provides a major critical and analytical account of the concept of 'tragedy' from its origins in the Ancient world right down to the twenty-first century.

A major new intellectual endeavour from one of the world's finest, and most controversial, cultural theorists. Provides an analytical account of the concept of 'tragedy' from its origins in the ancient world to the present day. Explores the idea of the 'tragic' across all genres of writing, as well as in philosophy, politics, religion and psychology, and throughout western culture. Considers the psychological, religious and socio-political implications and consequences of our fascination with the tragic.

Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow at the University of Manchester. His numerous works include The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), Literary Theory: An Introduction (second edition, 1996), The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth Century Ireland (1999), and The Idea of Culture (2000), all published by Blackwell, as are his dramatic writings, St Oscar and Other Plays (1997), and the Eagleton Reader (1997) edited by Stephen Regan. His memoir The Gatekeeper was published in 2002.

Unrated Critic Reviews for Sweet Violence

The Guardian

Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic
by Terry Eagleton
328pp, Blackwell, £14.99
With this brilliant and difficult book, Terry Eagleton takes on one of the great clichés of contemporary literary criticism: that tragedy is dead.

Publishers Weekly

With chapters on "The Value of Agony," "Pity, Fear and Pleasure" and "Freedom, Fate and Justice," British literary critic and political theorist Eagleton (whose well-received memoir The Gatekeeper is just out from St.Martin's) runs through the West's tragic literature, from Sophocles to Ibsen an...

London Review of Books

The fall of Presidents (to say nothing of Cabinet ministers) and the deaths of ordinary people have not accumulated a rhetoric of tragedy: the dead of 9/11 are presumably too numerous and too much alike for the traditionally rigorous individuation of tragic fate.

Project MUSE

Terry Eagleton's Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic is an ironically brilliant work of theoretical antinomy, an exercise both in definition and in the denial of the very possibility of definition, and a materialist critique of an idea that, in the final chapter, is embraced on the level of myth.